database search

[pablodelapena]

Ok, this sint your usual search question...
What i want to do is have PHP search through a database filed and return anythign where the string is found exactly or where the individual words are found and then ordering by relevance.....

I ahve had a look thorugh the mysql docs and found a MATCH() AGAINST() thing, but it throws errors for me even though all the fileds are FULLTEXT???

This is just ione thign i saw and liked because it has a relevance thign which can be sued to order.

Any help? or ideas as to how i could search this database?

[drewdrewdrew]

there are a couple of things you have to consider here. one would be that using the match against indexing fulltext search, the search will only return less than 50% of the rows.

if you have 8 rows in your table and your search phrase is contained in at least 4 of the rows then mysql will return Empty Set.

another consideration is that you should convert the table to myisam because that is one of two ways you can search blob rows.

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE = myisam;

a proper search would look like this

SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE MATCH (your fulltext columns) AGAINST ('search term');

the way that I do it is to have a basic form/textarea for searching and then where it says search term I put ('" . $_POST['name of textarea'] . "')